Women’s Employment in Italy

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze Italian women's participation in the labor force in a life-course perspective. Specifically, the analysis is focused on mid-career women born between 1900 and 1964. First, we test hypotheses regarding how mid-career women’s patterns of labor market participation have changed over time. To this end, we focus on three dimensions of labor market participation deemed particularly relevant to testing the globalization hypothesis: a) fragmentation, defined as the propensity (or risk) of changing labor market status one or more times during a given period; b) job mobility, defined as the propensity (or risk) of moving between different jobs during a given period; and c) insecurity, defined as the propensity (or risk) of experiencing unemployment, informal employment or temporary employment during a given period. We then turn our attention to the hypotheses regarding the effects of family status on mid-career women’s patterns of labor market participation. Specifically, we try to ascertain whether there have been changes over time in the influence of family status on the probability of being in the three insecure labor market statuses (unemployment, informal employment, temporary employment); the probability of being out of the labor force; and the probability of experiencing upward, downward and lateral job mobility.